“Poetry is not about making things happen,” claims poet-critic Donald Revell, “That’s what language does. Poetry is about making language happen.” The poems in Glenn Sheldon’s first full-length collection, The Bird Scarer, live up to this decree and then some; under Sheldon’s guidance, words find so many new ways to happen, that a palpable energy burns off the pages. Time and again, phrases and sentences beg a second (even, third) reading, not because their meaning is obscure, or vocabulary twisted, but because the language has been kicked in the caboose. The poems reveal, strip down, and rebuild in exhilarating ways—not “Ha-Ha” exhilarating, but wake-up the senses (as well as the sensibilities) “Aha” exhilarating, as in the poem “Class Wars,” which explicates the art scene in 1980s Chicago. Here the speaker describes the self-conscious gallery artist as “trying to be discreetly visible // in his or her black and expensively / pensive clothing . . . .” There is an “artist look,” which is not so different from the “poet look,” which is not so different from what is hawked on Madison, or (since this is Chicago) Michigan, Avenue. Likewise, the speaker acknowledges the small-in-salary/“we came for the food” attendees, among whose ranks he counts himself: “A free night on the town was nothing / to sneeze at. The cheese was often / cut into cubes as if cubism, at last, / was profitable.” Sheldon’s wit packs a punch in this, as well as other, poems by playing sound into meaning(s).
Although Bird Scarer’s geographies ultimately range from Boston to Cuba and further south, the central perspective is that of an urban transplant, from the East coast to Chicago, where, as the new kid in town, the speaker can see himself and his adoptive city, with a quasi-voyeuristic eye. A healthy dose of postmodern skepticism—“I’m on Clark Street in dark / pants; all I know is how not to be a ghost,” and three pages later: “I’m here, wherever that is, / where everyone dresses in black like vampires”—informs each poem, while the core value under-girding the collection as a whole, is its honesty and, therefore, vulnerability. The narrator’s playing with cards, but he shows us their faces: I’m new in town, I’m out of work; I’d rather read in the library than get sucked into the grind. The poems’ observations arise organically from the combustion of brain cells colliding with each new piece of information.
But the poems are not confessional; the speaker is addressing an alter-ego. We are privy to the mental contractions of one blessed and damned with the ability to view his life from the outside, a tourist “visiting” his own dailiness with a quasi-voyeuristic stance of interest/disinterest, compassion—and detachment. The perspective is nearly always from above: in one poem, the protagonist/narrator is standing on an El platform (“higher than the blind /rooftops”), in another, he rides a double-decker bus; elsewhere, he is situated in his own imagination, hypothesizing about the future: “Our meal / will taste of ports and less populated / palaces just down river.” This aerial view gives a cinematic scope to the poems’ settings. And, cumulatively, we come to see that language both connects, and disconnects: “But the word will not / be denied height / or aerial view.” What could be a trope of “distancing” is actually free-ing; staying connected, while stepping back and acknowledging how any word we think or utter is, by definition, an abstraction; an attempt from “out of the body” to give name to the inexpressible knowledge of the purely sensate.
One of the biggest challenges for a writer today is bridging the gap between postmodern blasé banality and a beating heart. Sheldon, in honest, sad, funny-true poems, meets the challenge. The Bird Scarer has the feel of being born of a wise, fully formed intelligence, one that engages at the same time that it reminds: we are all, to some extent, posing; not just the artists, in their seriously dark de rigueur opening-night garb, nor the wealthy, or the tourist . . . all of us are dancing through our days, somewhere between what is actual and what is imagined.
reviewed by Priscilla Atkins, Holland, Michigan
Glenn Sheldon. Bird Scarer. Červená Barva Press, 2008. ISBN 9780615171678.
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James Longenbach’s assertion in The Art of the Poetic Line that “the line’s function is sonic” (xi) is a rhetorical flourish, an exercise in creative overstatement intended to open eyes to a truth about poetry as much as to say something simply true. Coupled with the opening line of the book – “Poetry is the sound of language organized in lines” (xi) – it turns our eyes to sound and may put our bodies in the right place to see what our ears can do in the hands of a poem on the page.
One of the most delightful things about this book is that it refuses the separation of reading and writing from hearing and performing. The poem is a performance that plays with the matter of sound whether on the page or on the stage – and the line – visual, aural, tactile – traces the form of the play. “Poetry,” Longenbach writes, “does not need to be spoken to exist primarily as a sonic work of art” (14). But this follows the discussion of a passage from King Lear with which the book begins, a discussion that moves from “Whatever else he is, Shakespeare is one of the great prose writers in the English language” (3) to a demonstration that great poems do not “simply describe a movement of thought” but rather embody and complicate the movement “through the relationship of syntax and line” (13). Poetry is a sonic work of art, but it works with the body, not the ears alone. And its work is a matter of relationship: it uses the eyes to grab us by the ears, and the means by which it grabs us – the line – exists “because it has a relationship to syntax” (18). Because line (unlike punctuation) “cannot be associated reliably with the way we speak or breathe” (xi), it resists abstraction. And this, perhaps, is what turns a writer like Longenbach to rhetoric and performance more than to grammar or logic. Not only does it resist abstraction, it defies rationalization. And so our “theory” of it is most likely to succeed where it takes the form of demonstration rather than argument: “look!” And when it does that, it may invite imitation – not in a derivative sense but in the sense that might introduce a partner to a dance: “walk this way.”
The line exists because it has a relationship to syntax, and “poems are poems because we want to listen to them” (120) – a marvelously relational pair of “definitions” that guides Longenbach through a fascinating discussion of the art of the line in Glück, Pound, Eliot, Williams, Dickinson, Stevens – all within the framework of a triumvirate that begins with Shakespeare, then continues through Joyce to Yeats.
Each of the three sections is a feast for the reader of poetry – whether a writer of poetry or not. This is not a “how to” book, but – by showing and showing and showing via a dizzying variety of poems and poets – it will sharpen the eyes to forms this sonic art has taken in some of the best of its practitioners and forms it may yet come to inhabit. Eliot, Longenbach reminds us, wrote that “poetry is a form of punctuation” (77) – and, like punctuation, it may inform our breathing. But, more, “to hear the work of line in a great contemporary poem is to listen again to the whole history of poetry in English” (77). Louise Glück writes in “Nostos” that “We look at the world once, in childhood. / The rest is memory.” (42) – and Longenbach takes up this memory in relation to vision in a sense that might properly be called Eucharistic: do this in memory, and the whole history of poetry is present. This is a Eucharistic understanding of real presence grounded in ubiquity rather than transubstantiation: poetry permeates the world, so our whole being in the world is anamnesis. Longenbach quotes Mallarmé: “There is no such thing as prose… There is the alphabet, and then there are verses which are more or less closely knit, more or less diffuse. So long as there is a straining toward style, there is versification” (99, 100). And, as Longenbach understands this, “Truly to strain toward style, to write in one way rather than another way, is not to take a stand on prose or line or meter or rhyme: it is to discover what the language of a particular poem requires” (100).
This little book is an invitation to turn our bodies to the matter of what the particular poem – the poem we encounter here, now, with our eyes, our ears, our hands – requires. A welcome respite from the torturing of poems called “workshopping,” it is an exercise, a work in which the poem is subject rather than object, in which poet and poem work. Longenbach and the poets he enlists as partners – from Shakespeare to Yeats – make this work a pleasure for readers, including (but not limited to) the subset of readers who are also writers.
reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago
James Longenbach. The Art of the Poetic Line. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2008. ISBN 978-1-55597-488-6.
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Albert DeGenova’s The Blueing Hours moves from darkness to light – the reader moves from passion to doubt to the struggle to survive intact – in a brilliantly structured book which carries the reader to dawn. This isn’t surprising for here is a poet who does not want to trade Earth for Heaven or Hell. Al is betting everything that the objects of this world – flawed or not – are charged with meaning that we humans need more than some elusive transformation into perfection.
The Blueing Hours is simply – and I make no apology for what sounds like hyperbole but is truth – the first 21st century book of poems that offers a portrait of heterosexual masculinity. Talk about risks: Al’s poems are tender (as a father to his sons), stark (as a son to a father), and unblinking (three generations of men sharing intellectual space in the city of Chicago). Al rejects facile romanticism or the forgiveness that nostalgia offers. He is in a blinking contest with a city of contradictions: one that showcases class differences, ethnicity vs. a larger citizenry, myopia vs. the exaggerated skyline of bragging skyscrapers.
It’s a book launched by the extension of the night: jazz clubs, neons, poetry readings, bar noises. He takes his readers from the red hours, the black hours that we writers know too well, to the blueing hours. Here is a poet who does not have to re-invent the color wheel, but rather use it to keep the world from the false dictionary of black and white.
Al has always been a poet, I suspect, but now he can point at his writing as evidence of his long journeys within himself. He is a generous poet for, like the many visionaries of Chicago (including Carl Sandburg and Gwendolyn Brooks), his insights are our insights. He makes us wealthy in a currency about soul, life, passion. One word at a time, one heartbreak at a time, one rescue at a time.
reviewed by Rane Arroyo, University of Toledo
Albert DeGenova. The Blueing Hours. Virtual Artists Collective, 2008. ISBN 978-0-9798825-3-1.
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“Upon Being Asked What I Believe In,” near the end of Christine Rhein’s Walt McDonald Prize winning Wild Flight, is a key to the whole collection. She begins with language: “I say, for starters, the word in, / the way it dumps quicksand before / love and trouble, or after belief / and jump right!” (90) This delight in the smallest of words and what they do in relation to others serves Rhein well – and it is the relation, the dumping of quicksand, more than the sound or the shape, that first captures her attention. The list that follows in this poem is full of ordinary words naming ordinary objects full of life. The poet describes, but she also invites readers into a world of wooden spoons “meandering through thick lentil soup / with basil” (90) – a world rich with “music from unexpected sources” (90). This is a working world best known by working, not watching, just what one would expect from a poet-engineer – but also a wonderfully distilled instance of poetry’s experimental possibilities. In Rhein’s hands (and she is always anxious to get them on the working of the world), the experimental possibilities of poetry have less to do with the poem’s form than with its action. She speaks of “the temple / of science and poetry” (91); but the temple is also a laboratory and a workshop. Poetry – itself a making – is about knowing and doing as well as feeling, one of the things that made it a serious rival, not simply a frivolous alternative, to philosophy, if we are to believe Plato’s dialogues.
The book begins with a series of recollections of the poet’s father that inform the whole. There is an interesting parallel between the insistence on “German suffering” articulated by a Jewish woman speaking to the poet’s reflection “In the Women’s Room” and a pervasive suburban angst that resonates through poems like “How to Tell It,” in which a childhood friend who stayed in the city when the poet’s family fled looks the poet up in the suburbs. As the friend drives away, the poet, waving from the porch, knows she won’t phone “as promised, our friendship frozen / like a cartwheel mid-turn, my lawn too vast, / too green, no sidewalks heaved up by roots” (37). While it may be difficult to muster sympathy for this poetic persona with a vast green lawn and no sidewalks. it seems the collection is in part a struggle to thaw such frozen relationships in close encounter with objects that are full of life. And that is where music enters, making poetry of a collection that begins dangerously close to chopped prose. The beginning is poignant, no doubt; but breaking it into lines does not make it sing.
Rhein’s words do sing, though, beginning with “During Plans for War, Crows”: “This flock, explicit ink / in a landscape of snow, // as if there were no buried layers, / grass and root, rock and bone” (19) and “Story Problems”: “Edvard Munch painted different versions of The Scream. / Plot the size of the howls against / the intensity of the blood-red sky” (21). Plotting sound’s size against the intensity of sky’s space stops us long enough to catch the rhythm as well as the problem posed in those three lines. And each verse of this poem takes an equally illuminating turn, as in this little homily on a pericope of Stalin: “Stalin said, A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths / a statistic. Prove his theory using AIDS victims. / Solve for grief in Africa” (21). Is this nothing more than a trite criticism of Stalin’s atrocities? Does it raise the possibility that AIDS policies are equivalent to Stalin’s – thereby raising the question of who plays Stalin’s role? Does it simply cast Africa as victim and contain AIDS related suffering there? Does it call into question the act of “proving” a theory by using “victims” rather than encountering persons as persons? Perhaps all of the above. And, particularly, in the last possibility, we see some of the subtlety with which Rhein sets about thawing cartwheels in mid-turn.
Rhein uses words to experiment with ideas about objects in the world, but she also uses words as objects on which to experiment with vision – as in “Self-Portraits, Three-Way Mirror” (27). It is tempting to read this as two poems – one left-justified, one right – reflecting each other as they reflect two sides of the poet’s personality. The left is an engineer, the right a poet – dangerously close to a simple repetition of the stereotypical division of left and right brains in popular psychology. But the title directs us to self-portraits (plural) and a three-way mirror: the poetic persona is not simply reflected in a mirror, and the two sides do not simply reflect one another. If we encounter the persona at all, we do so in front of the mirror, reflected on three sides, turning the way a person standing before a mirror in a fitting room turns. Suddenly, the blank space spiraling down the center of the page appears. the closest thing we have to looking the poet in the eye.
And “In Code” (40, 41) is both visually arresting and conceptually explosive. It begins with an excerpt from The Detroit Free Press noting that “It was the complex software created at Michigan’s Gene Codes Corporation that made most of the 1,571 successful World Trade Center victim identifications possible” and that “the Gene Codes staff is working on Version 137 of the software called Mass-Fatality Identification System, M-FISys, pronounced emphasis.” One might just stop at M-FISys, staggered by the fact of 137 iterations of software designed for mass fatality identification – and counting. But Rhein writes a computer program down the left margin while she juxtaposes “tiny vials cradling / flecks of charred bone” with “parents, siblings, children / silently opening their mouths to offer / a swab of their cells, the tangible scrape / of something carried within” and “your four-year old son / building towers of LEGO, / knocking them over / with his Fisher-Price plane” (40). The program, running down the left margin, ends “Read Only / Object Stream / Description Hold // End If” – while the text running down the center (the way we might expect a poem to run) ends “hope packaged in manila envelopes, / in a lipstick or razor, toothbrush or / pillowcase a spouse folded / and smelled for the last time / or maybe the first” (41). The program on the left margin and the stanzas running down the center are staggered, so “Read Only” appears in the gap between the last two stanzas, while “End If” appears on the line after the last stanza ends. Reading left to right, line by line, there are no stanza breaks, though the gaps between the “program” and the “poem” make the two appear to be in separate columns. As if there were no buried layers.
“And the Beat Goes On” (67, 68) is a “found” pantoum that uses advertising slogans and phrases from popular songs (while evoking, at least for one generation of readers, visual and aural images of Sonny and Cher) to shed new light on “Another day in paradise.” It comes at the beginning of the fourth and final section of the collection, set in motion by a comment from Fran Lebowitz: “Science has done absolutely nothing about noise. The worst design flaw in the human body is that you can’t close your ears…” (65) The poems in this section circulate around the world’s noise – but also its processes – our processes – of tuning, nightingales in London and Berlin that “now sing fourteen decibels louder / to be heard by mates, quintupling the pressure // in their lungs” and a poet in the suburbs musing on silence while trying not to hear the “boom! boom! boom! / from the shooting range” two miles away.
So many ways, contra Lebowitz, to close our ears…
And this is a wonderful first collection by a poet intent on using some of them to open our eyes to unexpected music from unexpected sources, prodding us (the way engineers often do) to get our hands on the working of the world if we expect to know it.
reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago
Christine Rhein. Wild Flight. Texas Tech University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-89672-621-5.
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In a literary market replete with mediocre inspirational verse, Twenty Poems to Nourish Your Soul is a celebration of the best spiritual writing, both prose and poetry. Anyone seeking the saccharine will be sadly disappointed.
Judith Valente, a former Wall Street Journal correspondent and Pulitzer Prize finalist, currently a journalist for public television’s Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, and her husband, circuit court judge Charles Reynard, have combined their talents to render twenty modern poems by favorite authors along with a commentary for each poem.
The poems are arranged by themes drawn from Ignatian spirituality, including attentiveness, simplicity, loss and mystery, among others. Two poems address each of the ten themes and include such beloved authors as Stanley Kunitz, Lisel Mueller, W.S. Merwin, Mary Oliver, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, to name a few.
But it is the commentaries that give this book its special character. For example, Valente’s response to Hopkins’ “Kingfishers Catch Fire” offers a thoughtful analysis for the twenty-first century workaholic. She discusses not only her mother’s job in a Chicago pickle factory and her father’s manual labors, but also her own breakdown of sorts after seven years with The Washington Post, and her devastating layoff from The Wall Street Journal just after her nomination for the Pulitzer. She quotes Ignatius of Loyola and Teilhard de Chardin for advice on how to transcend the modern-day slavery of one’s job — easier said than done.
Valente’s stories can be lighthearted as well. One of my favorites is her tale of the Irish locksmith who helped her get into her apartment in London, where she was on assignment for The Wall Street Journal. When she offered him a cup of tea, he obligingly showed her how to make “a real cup of tea,” thus demonstrating Judith Moffett’s poetic lines, “The steeping in the dark; blind alchemy.”
A kind of dispassionate self-knowledge emerges in Reynard’s perspectives on the poem “Aimless Love” by Billy Collins. Reynard begins by discussing the theme of simplicity: “I have devoted a good portion of my life to the art of complication. My chosen profession is the law.” He recounts his years as a student, lawyer, politician, and state’s attorney, and describes with rare humility and candor the toll that his profession took on his first marriage, which ended after over three decades of struggle to balance career and marriage. He admits, “If one had accused me in a court of law of being an insufficiently attentive husband and self-centered man, I suspect the judge would have ruled, ‘guilty as charged.’” The current challenges of married life in the two-career family are even more complex, he asserts, and thus “our collective hunger for greater simplicity” is more relevant than ever. In this vein, his discussion of “The Hammock” by Li-Young Lee includes a touching quote from a birthday card given him by one of his two daughters, Rachel, at age eight or nine. She had written in crayon that she loved him so much her heart “oh most burst.”
Valente and Reynard not only draw on their own personal experiences in each essay and cite favorite lines from the poems , but also consult classic religious texts by Meister Eckhart, St. Therese of Lisieux, Brother Wayne Teasdale, C.S. Lewis, Rumi, and a host of others. In one essay, Reynard quotes Plato, John of the Cross, and Etheridge Knight in his jail cell, all on the same page. Valente’s tea story turns to Okakura Kakuzo’s classic, The Book of Tea, which refers to tea as “the cup of humanity.” The combination of personal insights, poetic analysis, and the great mystical and theological writings give the book laudable depth and allow the reader to play with ideas that mix the human with the divine in unusual ways.
This book will appeal to poetry lovers, traditional believers, and nontraditional seekers who reach for meaning amid the pressures and vicissitudes of modern life. Valente cites Gerard Manley Hopkins’ term “inscape” to refer to the sacredness that, according to Hopkins, lies at the core of all things. For readers looking for a tour of the “inscape,” Twenty Poems to Nourish Your Soul will prove to be a consummate guide.
reviewed by Donna Pucciani, Wheaton, Illinois
Judith Valente and Charles Reynard. Twenty Poems to Nourish Your Soul. Chicago: Loyola Press, 2006. ISBN 0829418695.
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